Moon Walker
India is officially on the moon.
The Chandrayan project opens a wide array of opportunities in global space technology market for India.
It was a proud moment for the ISRO Scientists, who have placed India as the fourth Nation after the US, Russia and ESA to have the National Flag painted on the moon. Our former President Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was one of the pioneers who took initiatives for this Chandrayan Project. His continuous guidance helped the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network at Peenya, Bangalore to achieve this moment of pride. Once again we proved that India can do anything and any dream will not be left unfulfilled if we dare to do so.
Top 5 KPOs
Outsourcing of legal work is not new and has been around for a while. However, its potential has only been realized in recent times. This has led law firms to open outsourcing units to take advantage of this opportunity. Our list of Top 10 Legal Outsourcing Companies in India includes third party vendors and third party multi-service BPOs. This list does not include the law firm captives or the corporate captives, which also have a huge presence in India. A brief detail of those companies are given below :-
1. Pangea3 is a Mumbai based outsourcing firm. Its legal work includes contract drafting, legal research, drafting of court documents for filing in US and UK courts, patent applications and monitoring, and document review and analysis.
2. G B Law Solutions is a Delhi-based firm offering a gamut of legal services that include Legal Representation, Legal Research and Analysis, Legal Transcription, Legal Drafting, Coding and Documentation Service.
3. King, Stubb & Kasiva, based in New Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata also offers BPO services to cater to the US and European markets.
4. Legal Source is a legal firm offering specialized solutions in Transcription, Coding, Document Management, Scoping, Billing, Secretarial and Paralegal Service. It is based in Chennai.
5. Economicalservices.com is a New Delhi-based firm that is involved in both Legal and Paralegal Assignments.
BOLLYWOOD Reinventing Business Model
Starting its first production in the year 1913, Bollywood (Indian Hindi Film Industry) has come a long way and was given Industry Status by the Central Government seven years back. The legitimacy of Industry Status brought with it a rush of organized funding from financial institutions. Banks like EXIM Bank and IDBI are now bullish on funding movies and have increased the loan amount over the years in leaps and bounces. For this influx of capital investment, a Rs 30 Crore film does not make the cut of an expensive movie anymore. Films like Jodha Akbar, London Dreams have a budget of Rs 50 - 70 Crore and films with such high budget are being made more often these days. Marketing budgets too have shot up to 40-80 percent of a movie’s total cost changing the marketing format totally. Movies are marketed like any fast moving consumer durable now says Siddharth Roy Kapur, Director, UTV Motion Pictures. The radio, internet, blogs, on-ground events are also finding favour along with the traditional print, television and outdoor media. Filmmakers are recovering their costs not just from box-office collections but also from selling the rights of their films, including new media like mobile, internet and gaming rights, to corporate studios, in-movie ads and film merchandising. Red Chillies Entertainment sold the worldwide distribution rights of Om Shanti Om, a Rs 35 Crore budget film, for Rs 75 Crore to Eros International Last year. Multiplexes and digitization by their owners have facilitated wide releases and penetrate smaller towns. Its soaring budgets and diversified revenue streams have made the Bollywood Film Industry a unique business model in itself which has been completely reinvented becoming virtually unrecognizable from what it was 10 years ago.
Source : Business Standard, August 2008
Customers and Retailers Shop Floor Dynamics
One of the most interesting formats to emerge from France has been the hypermarket, a concept which soon spread all over the world. The growth of the hypermarket and superstore has been one of the retail phenomena of the past few years. Hypermarket has not only helped people to get everything under a single roof, but also has helped them to purchase it at much lower price but here the question that keeps popping up is that do the customers trust retailers? A survey helped us to understand the psyche of the shoppers and showed the positives and negatives.
67 percent of those surveyed believe that shopping is fun. Indians love to spend time in malls and regard this as their favorite leisure activity. In China too 40 percent shoppers agree to this same leisure-shopping philosophy. This survey automatically makes the retailers create exciting formats that encourage window shopping increasing their respective shoppers in hand.
Over 40 percent shop for fresh food every day. Both India and China are very finicky about fresh food and tend to make daily trips to stick to this. Thus Indian shoppers usually buy a small share of fresh food from organized retail. The survey also showed that 67 percent of the shoppers distrust retailers. Indian shoppers also want to shop within a traveling distance of 15 minutes.
It is forecasted that by 2015 India will become a $450 billion retailing market. At present there are only 13 million of the 204 million households in India patronizing organized retail. This will rise to 65 million households by 2015. Size of organized retail in India will rise from $7 billion in 2007 to $65-80 billion in 2015 and the share of organized retail will also rise from 4-5% in 2007 to 14-18% in 2015.
Are IT Companies Recession Proof?
Much has changed since the dot-com implosion and subsequent recession of 2001 and 2002, when the tech sector took a huge hit and many IT jobs were cut. A survey of the current IT landscape, however, suggests that tech departments are well prepared to weather whatever comes their way in the next year, and that IT — thanks to lessons learned from the last downturn — is much more resistant to economic uncertainty than it once was.
The major shift for IT during the past few years has been a much sharper focus on cost containment and ROI, not to mention significantly leaner staffs. Thanks to IT practices such as SaaS (software as a service), outsourcing, and virtualization, the cost of obtaining essential IT services is much lower than in years past. Most important, technology is now viewed by virtually everyone on the C level as a key strategic component of business success. Enterprises that slash their tech budgets could end up cutting their own throats.
In July, Nasscom forecasted a growth rate between 21 to 24 percent for the current fiscal year for software and services revenue, both from the domestic and export markets. This forecast contrasts with 28 percent revenue growth for the previous fiscal year. Nasscom plans to review its revenue growth targets next month. By that time, there will be an indication of the industry’s performance in the last quarter of the year. So even if it is called a slowdown, a downturn, or the dreaded “R” word, worries about the state of the world economy have increased across virtually all sectors except one, and that is : TECHNOLOGY.
United World Economy
